Higher-order modules and the phase distinction

  • Authors:

  • Robert Harper;John C. Mitchell;Eugenio Moggi

  • Affiliations:

  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3QG, UK

  • Venue:
  • POPL '90 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

In earlier work, we used a typed function calculus, XML, with dependent types to analyze several aspects of the Standard ML type system. In this paper, we introduce a refinement of XML with a clear compile-time/run-time phase distinction, and a direct compile-time type checking algorithm. The calculus uses a finer separation of types into universes than XML and enforces the phase distinction using a nonstandard equational theory for module and signature expressions. While unusual from a type-theoretic point of view, the nonstandard equational theory arises naturally from the well-known Grothendieck construction on an indexed category.